The
mark of a significant contribution to scholarship is not that the work
resolves long-standing debates. The debate often becomes more complex,
entangling emotions, politics, ethics, legalities, and competing
historical narratives. Rather than providing definitive answers, truly
valuable research multiplies the questions, complicates the discussion,
and demonstrates the stakes. Such are a few of the accomplishments of
Barry Barclay’s Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights.
With extended discussions of indigenous intellectual property rights
and the necessarily related issues of law, ownership, sovereignty,
archiving, and art, Barclay’s book offers much to an incredibly wide
variety of audiences. And although the book and its arguments prove
problematic in terms of widespread practical usage, Barclay effectively
demonstrates that a middle ground can and must be forged between native
and non-native notions of law.

Barclay
begins with a lengthy Introduction, called “Before the Beginning,”
which exemplifies the type of thinking and writing substantiating the
book as a whole. Academic readers might need to adjust their
expectations because one does not confront footnotes, scholarly
arguments, or ethnographic research. Rather, Barclay’s gift is
eloquence, at times to odic heights. Perhaps he is writing as best a
filmmaker can: the narrative moves as a montage of scenes. Barclay
imagines James Cook arriving to Turanga’s east coast with a film crew,
ready to film “first contacts.” He further imagines the scripting of
director’s cues, camera shots, the signing of release forms, archiving
the film, the film’s viewings at lofty institutions of British art and
science, even the relationship between such an imagined filming and
tea-towel sets featuring images of exotic natives. Although
fantastical, the introductory essay articulates most of the issues
addressed in the following chapters and Barclay tallies them in a link
between biodiversity and intellectual property: “This is extraordinary;
it’s likely nobody will ever see a moving image that was not, at
conception, invested (via copyright) with market rights. Is every plum
that grows ‘owned?’ Maybe most are. It is possible, nevertheless, that
there is some place on the planet where a plum grows independently of
ready-for-market ticketing. It is not possible that there is such a
place for the moving image. There probably never was” (p. 14). And with
these concerns over copyright, ownership, images, plants, and rights
woven together, Barclay ends the introduction but begins the book.

The main content of Mana Tuturu
consists of four parts that build upon each other incrementally, though
each part offers mostly differing case studies. One could easily
excerpt a part or two for a course reader without losing much of any
sense of a larger argument. In fact, one of Barclay’s strong suits is
that each part seems to be a variation on a theme; and although that
theme might shift between plants, art, film, archives, copyright, land
rights, etc., the reader is gifted a rigorous, indigenously informed
lens by which to examine the topic at hand. Because Barclay seamlessly
ties the themes together across the parts, and because the issues
organically overlap, I will address his central claim instead of
surveying each part’s sections.

Throughout
the book, Barclay literally travels the world examining powerfully
telling and often tragic incidents of where indigenous intellectual
property rights (IIPR) fail to address the real, living relationships
maintained by people with their land, arts, oral traditions,
literatures, designs, fauna, flora, seeds, medicines, sciences, and
technologies. Worse, Barclay successfully proves, that the IIPR
language and standard was ostensibly created and mandated in order to
serve the best interests of indigenous peoples. Not only do IIPR laws
group together the thousands of indigenous life ways (Cree, Inuit,
Kayapo, Maori, et al.), but they do so to universally rule how these
diverse communities are to think of their own “natural” and man-made
worlds. Land, seeds, paintings, genetic code, and dances are
properties. And being property, they exist in a world of market
relations, able to be owned, bought, sold, and valued according to the
values of other “things.” Among the many problems with this
object-oriented view, one of Barclay’s strongest arguments is that
whereas copyrights expire over time, indigenous treasures grow more
valuable. The net effect is that the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), various United
Nations’ agencies, and of course academics everywhere, are reproducing
a legal and ethical framework that robs indigenous communities at the
single instance they are seemingly giving them protection from theft.
Barclay quotes himself sufficiently on this point: “Are not these
things we value—concrete and abstract, ancient and modern—are they not
called taonga by us? Treasures, in the English? Treasures, some of
them, with a mauri . . . We once had taonga. We once had guardians. We
once had keepers . . . What we have now—if we are to believe what
we hear—are owners. What we have now are properties” (p. 65).

As
Barclay constantly reminds us, the conundrum is global and
civilizational: aboriginal vs. colonizer law (and already we fall into
an overly simplistic binary). How do we conjoin disparate notions of
right relationships, one object-orientated and market driven, the other
intersubjective and based on kinship? One of my favorite aspects of
this book is how Barclay reminds the reader again and again of the real
emotional hurt and violence that comes from being dispossessed of one’s
animals, plants, land and even ceremonial art designs. In academic
classrooms and museum exhibitions, we rarely talk about such pain and
hurt resulting from completely legal dealings; though I imagine we do
so in Indigenous Studies settings more so than elsewhere. Barclay
proposes some interesting, though practically problematic, solutions.
And to be sure, the worth of his book should not depend upon this
criticism. That said, Barclay makes the claim that indigenous words and
perspectives must be incorporated into the legal documents that
structure copyright, ownership, and accessibility. He centers his
argument on the Taonga Maori Deposit Agreement at The New Zealand Film
Archive. When asked to modify the agreement to establish a “Maori
marker stone” in the English-language legal landscape, Barclay finally
decided upon “mana tuturu.” For the purposes of the agreement, Barclay
tells us, “mana tuturu” would be translated as “Maori spiritual
guardianship” (p. 115).

As
in his books and films, Barclay should be complimented for his
insistence on the use of indigenous words in English works when the
indigenous words best convey the reality being expressed. With “mana
tuturu” Barclay spends some time expressing why “guardianship” is more
appropriate than “ownership.” And although he discusses to a lesser
extent that “spiritual” is to account for the ancestral guardians, his
use of “spiritual” raises important questions that Barclay does not
address. “Spiritual” carries with it a certain amount of colonial
baggage to be sure. Following René Descartes, psychologists,
physicists, theologians, legal scholars, indeed most of the Western
world, has relied upon the binaries of mind and matter, body and
spirit. As a scholar of indigenous religions, I can say that we rarely
see such binaries at work in pre-colonial, indigenous worldviews. And
while I have no basis for querying his translation of Maori words, I
see a subtle but misleading possibility arising when we start using
Cartesian notions of the world to make sense of indigenous lifeways. If
this binary is organically Maori and not an adoption of Western
categories, Barclay should have gone at least some distance in
unpacking that worldview. Does Barclay’s understanding of Maori
“spirituality” mean that Maori people think of the world as having
spirits (bodiless beings)? Are Maori spirits the same as souls? Do
these spirits experience reincarnation? I mean to be waggish here with
very serious consequences. My concerns with Barclay’s semantic
proposals are that such solutions sometimes reassert colonial ethics
(Cartesian frameworks); sometimes they demonstrate the magnitude of the
problem (international law applied broadly to disparate indigenes); or
perhaps in Barclay’s case, they do both. Barclay simply could have done
more to make sense of that very heavy concept, spiritual, since it
pervades his entire book, starting with the title.

Born
of Maori descent (Ngati Apa), Barclay grew up in Wairarapa. With
training in radio and film (as well as the priesthood), Barclay’s
earlier films covered topics such as energy conservation and the life
of Indira Ghandi. Barclay then went on to work with Michael King on the
watershed film series Tangata Whenua
(1974), which focused on Maori culture and worldview. He wrote and
directed a film on genetic resources, ownership, and erosion entitled Neglected Miracles
(1985), which brought him popularity among the groups fighting over
crop biodiversity. Only two years later, Barclay directed the film, Ngati, which was widely praised as being the first Maori directed dramatic feature. His next film, Te Rua, continued the focus on the Maori while also delving into art, ownership, and museums. Then, his film Feathers of Peace
centered on the Moriori of Rekohu (The Chatham Islands). All considered
I cannot imagine a more appropriate author than Barry Barclay for a
book on “Maori treasures and intellectual property rights.” And judged
by its contributions, I can see how Mana Tuturu
was a lifetime in the making. This is a very smart, very relevant book.
Barclay has produced a text that is hard to categorize, and harder to
stop thinking about.

David
Delgado Shorter is an Assistant Professor of Folklore at Indiana
University. He is presently completing work on a book tentatively
entitled Holy Dividing Lines: Rewriting Yoeme (Yaqui) Ethnography,
that draws upon research conducted in collaboration with Yoeme peoples
in northwest Mexico since 1993. One of the threads running throughout
Shorter’s research is how non-indigenous terms and categories not only
fail to accurately portray indigenous worldviews, but also how such
terms actually have a role in the process of colonization.
Additionally, he is creator of a major digital exhibition and archive
project calledVachiam Eecha: Planting the Seeds, which explores Yoeme ethnography, digital media, history and politics.